Young people’s views on complaints and advocacy

For this report, we asked children and young people in care for their views at a big consultation event. As well as this, we invited children and young people to send us their own accounts of the last complaints they had made. We also made some visits to establishments to meet more groups of children and young people. For our consultation event, we invited children from different local authorities across the country, and did not just choose children we already knew or who were already in local participation groups or Children in Care Councils. We asked all the children who came to the event to take part in a voting session where they gave us their answers to a series of questions we projected on to a screen, using electronic voting pads to tell us what they thought. We then asked the children at the event to give more views in one of a series of discussion groups. As well as this, we visited some establishments to hold discussion groups for other children who had not been at the main consultation event.

Each group we ran was led by a member of the Office of the Children’s Rights Director, and another member of our team took notes of the views the children gave. Parents, carers, staff members and other adults who had brought children and young people to our discussion groups were not with the children during the discussions, so that the children could freely talk about their views. We gave children a shopping token to thank them for taking part in our discussions. At the event, we also set up some electronic screens on which children could enter more views while they were waiting for our groups or during the lunch break. The answers typed on to those screens are included in this report.

As always in children’s discussion groups we run, we asked open questions for discussion, but did not suggest any answers. We told the children and young people that they did not have to agree on any ‘group views’, but could give different views, and could disagree without having to argue for their views against anyone else; we would write down all their different views. We explained that we would be adding children’s views together and not saying in this report who said what, and that taking part in our discussions was voluntary.

This report contains, as far as we could note them down, all the views given by the children and young people, not our own views. We have not added our comments. We have not left out any views we might disagree with, or which the government, councils, professionals or research people might disagree with. Where we have used a direct quote from what a child or young person said, this is either something that summarises well what many had said in a group, or something that was a clear way of putting a different idea from what others had said.

As well as our discussion groups, we invited children and young people involved in our events to send us their accounts of the last complaints they had made – what the complaint was about, how it was looked into, and what the result was.

As with all our reports of children’s views, we have done our best to write this report so that it can be easily read by young people themselves, by professionals working with young people and by politicians.